Designing for Designers:

Research

What’s out there?

We created designer and client accounts on Wavlength’s existing platform and competing platforms (upwork, fiverr, designhill, dribble) and connected them in a freelance work job to get an understanding of how they mediate interactions between designers and clients.

The Rookie Designer

User needs:

• Communication Facilitation

• Payment Facilitation

• Guidance

• Protection of boundaries

The Client

User needs:

• Communication Facilitation

• Payment Facilitation

• Guidance

• Ensure designer’s capabilities

Design

Design Studio

As a team, we collaborated in a design studio to sketch quickly iterate on ideas for the presentation of plans to the prospective clients and the dashboard that facilitates communication and brings structure to projects. We left these design studios with actionable ideas for these key pages that would form the basis of our prototypes.

Excessive Negotiation for Standard Plans

When a designer, like any other business, creates a standard offering, it is meant to be non-negotiable. However, clients are prompted to negotiate deliverables, price, and deadlines as soon as they attempt to purchase a standard plan. We wanted to create a familiar flow for purchasing plans that was similar to purchasing other goods and services and that would make selling standard plans easy.

The issues to note are:

• Standard plans aren’t standard: clients can offer less money, sooner deadlines, and ask for more deliverables even when purchasing a standard offering

• Forced negotiation: even for a standard plan where the price is fixed by the designer, users are forced into multiple rounds of negotiation.

• Decisions don’t matter: even if a client chooses not to negotiate a standard offer, their decision results in the offer being sent to the designer rather then taking them to their payment info

Streamlining Standard Purchasing

We decided to remove the client’s ability to negotiate the terms of a standard plan, and streamlined the purchasing process by taking the client immediately to entering their card information.

Confusion When Building a Custom Plan

A “plan” on a freelance work platform is essentially the same as a contract in the non-digital world. For “rookie” designers, this is a critical yet difficult part of running a freelance design business. They know how to make great designs, but they do not know how to write business contracts that will protect them from aggressive or overbearing clients. Creating a seamless plan builder allows the designer to run their business successfully without having any business education and is one of they key reasons that “rookie” designers would use Wavlength instead of just running their business on social media.

The issues to note are:

• Unclear UX Writing: The instructions are in terms of “features” but we found that in our interviews, designers will talk about “deliverables” or “files.” Describing deliverables as “features” is usually associated with applications (not commissions) and makes the creation of a plan more difficult for the designer.

• Lacks affordances: it is difficult for the designer to view the details of the original request from the client. This means that there is a higher chance of them sending the client a plan that will not meet their needs and either require further negotiation or lose them the commission.

• Does not follow industry standards: relevant sections that are present in all other freelance work platforms do not exist here, such as a check-box field for file types that the designer will provide to the client and an explicit number of revisions that the client can request.

Seamless Contract Creation

We designed pages that allow the seamless creation of custom plans by “rookie” designers.

The highlights:

• UX writing that is clearly understandable: We’ve clearly labeled the deliverables, and changed the language of the instructions to provide better guidance. We’ve also make it easier to add and remove deliverables using symbols on the buttons rather than words.

• Obvious affordances to show client needs: it is difficult for the designer to view the details of the original request from the client. This means that there is a higher chance of them sending the client a plan that will not meet their needs and either require further negotiation or lose them the commission.

• Built for the “rookie” designer: Contrary to the industry standard, the plan description (which also functions as a custom message to the client) is moved to the end pf the process - after the designer has built their plan. A “rookie” designer will not have a great sense of what their plan will contain until they’ve already built it.

Lack of Communication During Work

Working on a design project involves a lot of communication between designers and clients; in fact, all designers we interviewed said that their best freelance work experiences involved a lot of quick communication with the client. The communication allowed them to figure out what the client needed and provide better deliverables.

Analyzing the existing dashboard, we found that it:

• Lacks a messaging feature: there is no easy, obvious, and familiar communication method

• Lacks focus: it contains unnecessary animations, and directs focus to actions (such as withdrawal) that are negative

• Premature entry: users are taken to the dashboard before the plan is accepted by both parties